2011-02-11

Monsters from the Id

First of all, let's just get this straight. I'm not mourning the demise of the Identity Card Scheme. It was a stupid idea, presented as a convenience but which would soon have become intolerably invasive. So, ding dong, the witch is dead.

On the other hand, in this economy, the destruction of id cards - the fifteen thousand already issued - seems unnecessarily severe and rather wasteful. I do appreciate that the public digestion of hard-drives is a nice piece of photo-op circus, but all that work to get the scheme as far as it had got, all the hardware used, all the time and effort, just flushed down the toilet?

Throwing public money away, that's what that is. The cards could still have been used - for a while at least - by the happy band of carriers who had them. It's not that they were of no utility whatsoever. Its not as if they had to inform international border agencies, travel operators and the like that these cards are now worthless as proof of identity. They chose to do that.

Now these quondam cardholders must either get new ids (at their own expense, or possibly public again) or just try and be relaxed about the idea that the card they may still carry will be sneered at by the minor authority figures who really don't need further reasons to treat folk like shit.